Working on a Web-Hosted Project? Here are 10 Dependable Hosts

As more and more open source projects are focused on the cloud and software-as-a service (SaaS) models, there is a premium on reliable online hosting infrastructure, and dependable providers. Where can you find the best providers? Netcraft has posted its Top 10 list of the most reliable hosting company sites for March 2009. Are you familiar with ReliableServers, and Hosting4Less? Not all of the companies on Netcraft's Top 10 list are household names, but they beat out all others in reliability tests, and it's also notable that almost all of these elite hosting companies run open source operating systems.

ReliableServers and Swishmail are the top two hosting companies on Netcraft's list. Both of them run FreeBSD as do two other winners on the Top 10 list. (Several others are running Linux.) The two winning hosting companies reportedly failed to respond to only two of the requests made by Netcraft's performance collectors during March.

According to Netcraft, ReliableServers has been on its Top 10 list three times in the last six months. You can get a private server from the company for your web hosted offerings starting at $199.95, and colocation services (where the company puts a server from you on their racks for redundancy) starting at $149.95 a month.

Overall, eight out of the top 10 most reliable hosting companies on the list are running open source operating systems. They all almost never failed to respond to requests in performance tests. If you're an open source project leader looking into the standard, household-name hosting services, these lesser known providers could be worth looking into. Here's Netcraft's complete list: